Timothy Sandefur blogged today about the vanishing unlikelihood of a successful predatory pricing scheme:
The theory goes like this: if one company cuts its prices really low, maybe even below cost (“loss leaders”) it’ll succeed in the market, and other businesses will fail. Then the first company will be a monopoly and jack the price up! The horrors! Thus the law forbids companies from trying to “harm competition” (i.e., succeed) by charging “unreasonably” low prices, and particularly by charging below cost. Loss leaders are illegal, for example, in California.
Of course, a child can see the problem with the theory: the instant the “predator” does raise his prices, the other companies will open their doors again, charge the market rate, and the clever “predatory pricing” strategy will fail.
In other news, Justin Fox observes (h/t to Ezra Klein for the link and for the term “messynomics”) that the unifying theme in the work of the latest crop of “Nobels” in Economics is that perfect-market models break down “with the injection of the tiniest bit of reality.”
Now even skeptics acknowledge that predatory pricing can succeed (in theory) when firms that have been priced out of the market face sufficient barriers to reentry. They just don’t accept in practice that such barriers ever occur. Consequently, the presumption that markets are contestable has become effectively conclusive under the law.
But a new paper by Berkeley’s Aaron Edlin argues that the theoretical foundations of skepticism about predatory pricing are weak even under the simplest assumptions, and that the evidence of its successful occurrence in the real world is substantial. And once those simple assumptions are abandoned in favor of realistic ones about firms having asymmetric costs and information, he claims, predation winds up making perfect sense.
You don’t need to be a Nobel laureate to suspect that even a modest nudge toward messiness would topple the Chicago School model of predatory pricing. But if you did, you might be thinking along the same lines as many who now are.
(Note to new readers: Since I was last a semi-regular contributor to this blog, before Aaron’s arrival, the content has become understandably much more focused on health care policy. I have blogged on legal issues relating to that topic in the past, and will continue to do so. When I write posts on other issues that are too serious for the weekend, I will tend to do so on Fridays. The exception will be, as here, when my post builds on material from other blogs posted that same day. I now return you to your regularly scheduled blogging.)
